Restaurant Review: The Chef’s Table gets an A for food
Credit to Author: Mia Stainsby| Date: Wed, 04 Sep 2019 18:00:11 +0000
The Chef’s Table at Vancouver Community College
Where: JJ’s Restaurant, 250 West Pender Street, Vancouver
when: Tuesdays to Thursdays during scheduled pop-ups
Info: vcc.ca/services/eat-shop–more/the-chefs-table-pop-up-kitchen/
It’s like a two-Michelin calibre meal for a mere $55. Wine matches for the five-course meal with an amuse bouche and mignardise ending is $22.
I’m reading your mind and it’s saying, ‘OK, what’s the catch.’ Right, there is one but it wasn’t a deal breaker for me. These Chef’s Table pop-ups are at Vancouver Community College so when it comes to ambience and service, Michelin level it ain’t. Service, you could say is sweet and uncertain, not suavely professional. But it gets an A for food.
But I’m telling you, the food compares more than favourably to haute meals where I’ve wanted to swat away silly theatrics and giggle at architectural presentations served with stiff, humourless formality.
The Chef’s Table was at VCC’s East Broadway campus in an institutional setting but last January, it moved to JJ’s Restaurant at the downtown campus which is set up as a restaurant. In the past, there’ve been many a panicked guest who arrived at this location when they should have been on East Broadway. Recalculating! Recalculating!
Chef Hamid Salimian is the instructor and what he does with his classes is breathtaking. The food is imaginative, beautifully presented, balanced, delicious, and flawless. Many of the dishes employ modernist techniques but without screaming ‘look at me, look at me!’ Instead, elements dove tail into a meaningful presentation.
Our seven-part dinner began with a ‘Parmesan foam snack’ involving sous vide, vacuum cooking, hydrocolloid, and liquid nitrogen. Pickled heirloom tomato, sorrel purée, green olive dust added colour and flavour. A lemon basil simple syrup was cooked under vacuum then ‘aged‘ in an ultrasonic bath.
“In 45 minutes, it’s like it’s aged for six to eight months. Aging happens when molecules start moving fast. It changes the flavour,” says Salimian.
Cured sturgeon with side stripe prawns, dill ash cured scallop and mussels in orange and dills broths from the Chef’s Table. Photo: Mia Stainsby.
Next, cured sturgeon, paper-thin and translucent, served with beautiful side stripe prawns, dill ash cured scallop and mussels in orange and dills broths meeting in a yin yang formation.
Puffed foie gras crumble is a comeback dish often on the menu. Foie is first cured with additions of lemon and orange peels and thyme. It’s cooked, then sieved through a tamis (drum shaped fine sieve), blended, then dispensed into mason jars with a whipped cream dispenser. It’s vacuum sealed, cooled and frozen overnight.
“The atmosphere inside the jar in the vacuum machine is like atop a mountain. The boiling temperature is different and it bubbles and foams,” says Salimian. The crumble is served with gelled apricot purée, thyme crumble, and honey and thyme sphere.
Beef tenderloin, wrapped in bacon, with sweetbread foie gras farce, a crisp potato cylinder filled with porcini mushroom foam and a truffled cauliflower puree hidden beneath the perfect carrot ‘dome’ at the Chef’s Table. Photo: Mia Stainsby.
In between courses, mini-breads arrived — charcoal brioche (wonderful), lavash crisp and baguette, with caramelized yogurt butter.
Dishes are conceived to teach students modernist techniques like sous vide, spherification, hydrocolloid gelling, freezing with liquid nitrogen as well as the all-out importance of mise en place.
Roasted squab breast and confit of leg and wing was served with a lobster quail sauce — all the sauces are so glossy and glassy. Blackened salsify — think skinny parsnip — is fermented in the same way as black garlic. The meats were tender, and lovely.
Next up, a perfect round of beef tenderloin, girdled with paper-thin bacon. On the plate, sweetbread foie gras farce, a crisp potato cylinder filled with porcini mushroom foam and a surprise — truffled cauliflower purée hidden beneath the perfect carrot ‘dome’.
Ruby chocolate mousse with pink meringue, compressed rhubarb and almond milk sorbet at the Chef’s Table. Photo: Mia Stainsby.
Dessert was a beauty — not dark, not milk, not white, but ruby chocolate mousse with shards of pink meringue, a compressed plank of rhubarb and perfectly quenelled almond milk sorbet made with liquid nitrogen.
The wine matches — with the exception of the Spanish cava that accompanied the seafood starter — all hailed from the Okanagan, and included whites from Gray Monk and Five Vineyards, a Pinot Noir from Prospect and an Inniskillin icewine.
Along with The Chef’s Table, the school also does a guest chef series, inviting previous grads to do a pop up. Recent guests included the chefs from CinCin and Amaranthus.
Boulevard Kitchen and Oyster Bar will be celebrating with a series of paella events.
Boulevard Kitchen and Oyster Bar celebrates its fifth year with a nod to Spain. On Sept. 22, from 4 to 6 p.m., it teams up with The Paella Guys, co-hosting The Great Paella Party on the patio. Chefs will prepare a trio of regional paellas in massive paella pans to be served with music and reception libations. Tickets are $38.
Then on Sept. 29, Oct. 6, 20 and 27, they’ll host Sunday Paella Dinners. The dinners begin with a reception with sangria or Spanish lager and progress to a three-course meal of tortilla espanola, West Coast seafood paella, and cinnamon sugar churro with chocolate sauce and vanilla ice cream. Tickets are $68.
For ticket information for both, go to boulevardvancouver.ca/events.